Eating chocolate could help to sharpen up the mind and give a short-term boost to cognitive skills, a University of Nottingham expert has found. A study led by Professor Ian Macdonald found that consumption of a cocoa drink rich in flavanols — a key ingredient of dark chocolate — boosts blood flow to key areas of the brain for two to three hours.

A recently completed study at The University of Arizona may have implications for the thousands of scientists worldwide who use “knockout” mice in their research. In the study, Knockout Mice: Is it Just Genetics? Effects of Enriched Housing on Fibulin-4+/- Mice, lead researcher Ann Baldwin, PhD, suggests that environmental factors may play a large part in research findings that investigators assume are due simply to genetic differences. Further, the study research indicates that appropriate environments may counteract the effects of some genetic deficiencies.

The Rong Li lab team has answered an important question about how mammalian eggs undergo maturation through an intricate process of asymmetric cell division. The team discovered a novel pathway by which chromatin exerts command on the cell membrane to produce a specialized machinery used for cell division.

Working in the remote forests of Cambodia, conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have just discovered Southeast Asia’s only known breeding colony of slender-billed vultures, one of the world’s most threatened bird species.

Give college students less instruction and more freedom to think for themselves in laboratory classes, and the result may be a four-fold increase in their test scores. So says Steve Rissing, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University. Rissing played a major role in revamping the way the university teaches its introductory-level biology courses.

Two-winged insects such as houseflies and mosquitoes that are active during the light of day rely on their vision for flight control, but they also get help from organs called halteres, which grow where a second set of wings might otherwise be found and aid in navigation. Scientists have wondered how four-winged insects most active at low-light times of the day, such as moths, accomplish complex navigational maneuvers, since they lack halteres. A research team studying hawk moths, the species Manduca sexta, has found an answer, with the unlikely help of microsurgery and Super Glue.